Babygate, 25 years later

Scot Cooper Williams came into this world Oct. 16, 1993 and was the center of a firestorm 24 hours later. His father David, an offensive tackle for the Houston Oilers, had missed the team’s game in New England to be with his wife when he was born.

The coaches were livid. Some of his teammates were upset and angry. A combination of timing of Scot’s birth, fog in New England and David not being able to catch the last flight out of Houston that Saturday night forced David to make a decision that cost him a $111,000 fine.

The story went viral – 1990s style. National headlines. Network television. Talk shows around the country. Everybody had an opinion, especially when the macho culture of pro football collided with changing times around the country (the Family and Medical Leave Act had passed in February 1993).

“It took me a while,” David said of the media frenzy, “to get over it.”

This week marks the 25th anniversary of Babygate and the men in the center of that moment can chuckle a little about it now.

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A quarter of a century ago, then-27-year-old David, who wasn’t one to miss a game for any reason, just wanted to be with his wife when she delivered. Debi had suffered a miscarriage the year before after a tubal pregnancy and he wasn’t leaving her side. They had planned to have a C-section the Monday after the game, but Scot had a mind of his own and Debi went into labor at 4 a.m. Saturday, and David missed the team charter.

David figured Scot would be born, mom and baby would get checked out and he’d have time to catch the last flight to Boston on Saturday night.

But that didn’t happen.

While Debi was in labor, David was on the delivery room phone with coaches and team officials. Time was running out to catch that last flight and the conversation wasn’t pretty.

“It was hard on her at the time … She could hear them screaming over the phone at me,” David said. “Finally the doctor just yanked the phone plug, took the phone off the wall and said ‘We’re not taking any more calls.’ ”

Scot didn’t arrive until almost 6:25 p.m. and, by then, it was too late for Williams to catch the 6:54 p.m. flight from either airport.

“Even if I had left the second after he was born, I still never would have made that plane,” he said. “It was nerve-wracking for me. I’d never been through anything like that. It was tough.”

He said teammates Mike Munchak and Bruce Matthews tried to arrange a private plane through a third party, but when David left the hospital around 11:30 p.m., he hadn’t heard back.

“I had been up with Deb since 4 o’clock that morning and going through that emotional roller coaster of getting screamed at and yelled at by coaches and general manager as I’m in the delivery room,” he said. “My wife’s giving birth and I’m getting screamed at. Man, it isn’t supposed to feel like this.”

David went home, showered and was sound asleep when the person called back. The voice on the other end of the phone said there were no guarantees he would get to the stadium in time. The pilot might be able to get him into one of the New York airports, but then he would have to drive to Foxborough, Mass.

“They were diverting planes everywhere,” David said. “At that point, I said, if he can’t fly me to Boston, just tell him to forget it. I made that decision on my own. I was absolutely exhausted.”

He paused.

“I was just (thinking), ‘Oh my gosh, I’m going to be fired.’ I knew it. I just knew I was going to be without a job the next day. It was crazy, but that was the decision I made.”

Read the whole thing, and marvel at it whether it’s the first you’ve ever heard of this or it takes you down memory lane, as it did with me. Sure seems hard to believe, here in 2018, that a father-to-be missing work to be at the birth of a child would even raise an eyebrow, but it did a lot more than that in 1993. However far we still have to go, we really have come a long way. All the best to the Williams family, for their unwitting role as trailblazers.